“Attolia has no business treating with the Medes,” she said, her voice raised.

Galen opened the door and gave her a warning look.

“Go away!” she snapped.

He shook his head but stepped back, leaving the door open.

“It was the act of a barbarian!” Eddis turned back to Eugenides. His eyes were closed. “And she’s going to be sorry,” she said as she left.

Out in the library Galen bowed very formally, excusing himself before he stepped past her. After he’d seen Eugenides and dosed him again with narcotics, he found Eddis waiting in the library. She was in one of the armchairs with her knees up and her feet pulled in under her skirts.

“Both of you in tears now,” he said.

Eddis sniffed. “I’m angry.”

“He’s not strong enough for you to be angry.” He looked helpless for a moment.

“Oh, I know,” said the queen, sighing. “He’s too weak to listen to me yelling, and if he dies, it’s my fault, and it’s already my fault that he’s lost his hand, and I’ve only the gods to thank he isn’t blind as well.” She pulled back her skirt a little way to reveal an underskirt, which she used to wipe her eyes. She sniffed and then stood up.

Galen watched with amusement. She smiled at him. “Go on with your lecture.”

“Which is?” Galen asked.

Eddis held one hand to her chest and orated. “If you choose that, after a lifetime of service to your family, my advice is to be ignored and I am to leave my post, then that is your prerogative, but so long as I am Physician of the Palace, I will insist that my prescriptions for the well-being of my patients will be observed…. Am I getting this right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I think I can guess the rest as well,” said the queen.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” said Galen. “I am grateful not to have to say it myself.”

So the queen of Eddis visited Eugenides while he slept. The fever passed but left him terribly thin and unable to do much more than sleep most of the day and night. Galen said it might be some time before he regained his strength.

On the rare occasions when Eugenides was awake, Eddis talked to him about the harvest, which was good, and about the weather, which was good, and not about her meetings with her ministers, the directors of her mines, the master of the royal forge, or the commanders of her small army, nor about the many diplomatic messages arriving from Sounis and Attolia. When he was in less pain, and awake more often, she told him what gossip she could from the court and apologized for coming to see him infrequently.

“If you had more time, Galen wouldn’t let you in anyway.”

“True.” The queen agreed. “And he listens to make sure I don’t upset you. I’ll bet his ear is flat against the door even as we speak,” she whispered, and got a rare smile in response.

She leaned back in her chair and pulled the thin gold circlet from her head in order to run her fingers through her short hair. “I’m going to pull it all out before I’m thirty,” she said. “I swear there’s someone asking me one thing or another from the moment I wake up until the time I close my eyes at night. When Xanthe wakes me in the morning, she asks me if I’d like my breakfast. I wish she’d just put it in front of me. It would be one less decision to make.”

He didn’t ask what decisions kept her preoccupied. She didn’t tell him. “I’ll see you in a few days, if I can.” She leaned over the bed to kiss him on the forehead. “Eat something,” she said, and left.

In Attolia the queen listened carefully to a report sent by her ambassador in Eddis.

“The fever didn’t kill him,” she observed.

“It seems not, Your Majesty.”

“Very well,” she said.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE EARLY FALL IN THE mountains had already come when Eugenides decided he’d looked long enough at his ceiling and dragged himself out of bed to look out the window. There was frost on the ground in the front courtyard. An army messenger was riding in on a mountain pony shaggy with its winter coat. Eugenides turned away and went to sit in the chair by the fire that was waiting for him. He was wrapped in a warm robe and had slippers on his feet. The stump of his arm was bound in a clean white bandage. The bandage was unnecessary; the wound was healed, but Eugenides didn’t want to look at it, and keeping it bandaged seemed the easiest solution.

His left hand, taking over the tasks of his right, seemed clumsy and uncoordinated, though Eugenides’s grandfather had always insisted that both hands be trained to serve interchangeably. Eugenides supposed they worked equally well with the thieves’ tools, and buttons were no difficulty, but buckling a belt was tedious, and his grandfather had never insisted he practice sweeping his hair out of his face and hooking it behind his right ear with his left hand. An oversight on his grandfather’s part, now revealed. Eugenides looked into the flames for a while, then ran his fingers through his hair, which had grown enough to fall down over his eyes, and looked around the room. There was a bookcase to the left of the fireplace and his desk to the right. Pushed to the back of the desk was an awkward pile of papers. In the center of the pile, he supposed, was the scroll he’d been recopying before he’d gone to Attolia. If it was there, it was hidden by the bowls and bandages and phials of different concoctions left by Galen and his assistants. The desk chair was missing. It had been moved to the library when they’d brought in an armchair to sit between the foot of his bed and the fireplace.

He stood up to poke at the papers at the back of the desk, but the medical detritus took up too much space for there to be any room for sorting. At some point ink had spilled across the text he’d been copying, obscuring the left half of a long paragraph. Eugenides sighed. He would probably remember most of the words, but they would still need to be checked carefully against another reliable copy. He rolled the scroll up and tossed it back into the pile of papers, then sighed again. There were few reliable copies of Thales’s original thoughts on the basic elements of the universe. That’s why his scroll was valuable and why he had been copying it. If it was left at the back of the desk much longer, it was likely to be completely ruined. It should have been returned to its case and reshelved in the library.

He made himself go look for the case and found most of his books, scrolls, and other materials shifted into piles on one of the library tables. He searched through the piles until he found the case labeled with Thales’s name and the title of the work. He slid the scroll into it and slid the case back into its slot on the library’s shelves. Then he went back to his chair by the fire. He was dozing there when Galen came by. He had a small amphora of lethium, and he carefully refilled the phial on Eugenides’s desk.

“The library’s a mess,” Eugenides said.

“I had noticed that,” said Galen. “I went looking for the Aldmenedian drawings of the human body last week, and I couldn’t find them.”

“So why hasn’t anyone cleaned it up?”

“It’s your library.”

“It isn’t. It’s the queen’s library. I just live here.”